All Years Are Election Years

Tyler Cowen argues that “it is unfortunate that the subprime crisis exploded in an election year.” Except, of course, that there’s no election being held in 2007. The election year is 2008: Next year. And yet Tyler seems correct in principle. We were certainly in “election year” mode by the time the crisis hit. But that just shows how far we’ve come — these days, essentially three years out of four are “election years” since the primary campaign unfolds so slowly over the year preceding the increasingly-early Iowa Caucus. The only real years that aren’t “election years” are the ones in the 2005/09/13/17/21/25 cycle — the other three are all election years.

That seems like a dreary and depressing outcome to me, but I’m not sure that there’s anything wrong with it as such.